Lighting Design Glossary

Animation
Time Series Animation
Time of day Animation
Time of Year Animation
Walk-Through Animation
Animation Path
Feature Animation
Geometry Animation
Morphing

(Terms of computer graphics)

The term animation refers generally to graphical displays that
are composed of synthetical images. A sequence of images with
gradual differences results in the same effect as a photographed
movie compared to a static photograph.
Computer generated animations are getting more and more
common, replacing hand drawn images and other special techniques.

There are several ways to generate dynamic changes
in computer graphics:

A Time series animation (time of day animation / time of year animation)
shows the changes in lighting (especially sun impact)
over the day or the changes over the year at
a fixed time of day.
Of course, this makes a lot of sense when creating
daylighting simulations. Our software will provide
the necessary features to create this kind of
animations easily.

Walk-through animations show a scene from a
succession of different viewpoints, the
animation path,
creating the illusion of motion through the scene.
With the Radiance software, walk through animations are the most
efficiently created, since they don't imply any changes in
the diffuse light distribution in the scene. Most frames
can therefore be interpolated from other nearby frames.

Feature animation modifies scene attributes
(material etc.) dynamically. This can also be used
to let objects in a scene appear or disappear,
by manipulating their transparency.
With the Radiance software, this effect can be most easily
created by rendering several variations of a scene,
and interpolating the resulting images.

Geometry animation
is the most complex, and requires
changing the geometric elements of a scene dynamically.
This is also what most people generally refer to when
using the term "animation" as it has been demonstrated
to wide audiences throught recent motion pictures
like "Terminator", "Jurassic Parc" "Toy Story"
and many others. There is currently no efficient
way to create this effect with radiance.

Image morphing
is a special case of image interpolation,
where the pixels of two or more images are moved
to different locations in the image, in order to
acheive a smoother transition between images that
show different geometry, rather than just different
features of the same geometry model. This requires
special software. (This should not be confused with
geometrical morphing, with is a special case of
geometry animation).